Evidence For The Plagues God Unleashed On Egypt_ - Plagues Of Egypt - Science Documentary.mp4

The Bible is full of beasts. But just how literally are we supposed to interpret the monsters of Scripture? We've found the answers by re-examining the ancient manuscripts, and what we've uncovered is very real. In the Exodus story, when Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites from slavery, we're told that God unleashed hell upon Egypt. Six of the ten biblical plagues involved beasts. Being small didn't mean these critters weren't deadly. Their incredible numbers made these mini-monsters unbearable. And while some of these creatures are well-known, others are shrouded in mystery. After turning the river Nile to blood, the Bible says God commanded Aaron to stretch his staff over the water. Hordes of frogs jumped out and smothered Egypt. To decode what beasts followed the frogs, we have to go back to the original words. Unlike modern English, biblical Hebrew has a very small vocabulary, so one word can mean different things in different contexts. So when we're looking at the biblical plague stories, looking at these words referring to the different plagues, our English translations might be very different from what the ancients who first told and heard these stories were imagining. It's plague number three where the mysteries really begin. The popular understanding of this plague and those that followed is ripe with mistranslation. The third plague is the plague of, in Hebrew, kinim. Kinim means biting insects. Now, a lot of traditional English translations have translated that as the plague of lice, and they do bite, but it would make just as much or maybe more sense to translate it as mosquitoes or gnats, which are much more aggressive. The aggressive blood-sucking and disease-carrying swarms of mosquitoes and gnats sound devastating and make for a much more monstrous plague number three. The fourth plague was flies, or was it something much worse? The fourth plague is the plague of arove. In Hebrew, arove refers to a swarm, a swarm of what is less clear. The idea that this was a plague of flies probably goes back to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures. In the Septuagint, the word arove was translated into a Greek word that refers to a dog fly. And so we get, for the fourth plague, a plague of flies. But the Greeks got it wrong. The Hebrew word arove could apply to a mixture of stinging swarms. So, in the tale of Exodus, God most likely sent flies and swarms of stinging insects like hornets and wasps. Now, that's a better plague. According to the Bible, God removed this plague only after Pharaoh promised to release the Hebrews. However, Pharaoh once again broke his promise, and so God unleashed an unspecified killing disease. But exactly what disease was it? The Bible tells us the horses, the donkeys, the camels, all the Egyptian livestock was dead within a day. Perhaps we should look to the smallest but deadliest beast known to man. Bacteria. The highly lethal Bacillus anthracis. It's the bacterium in anthrax. Once inside the bloodstream, the anthrax bacilli release toxins that destroy clotting agents, causing horrible tissue destruction and death. It literally causes the infected animal or person to bleed out from every orifice. This microscopic bacterium is only one by nine micrometers in size, but it is one of the most deadly beasts ever unleashed. The biblical description of the fifth plague and its devastation to Egypt's livestock fits with modern scientific descriptions of the effects of anthrax. But according to Exodus chapter 9, this was not the only tiny beast God unleashed. For the sixth plague, God tells Moses and Aaron to go and get ashes from the furnace and take them before Pharaoh and then have Moses throw the ashes up into the heavens and the ashes will spread out across the land of Egypt and cause shekhin on both animals and people. Shekhin in Hebrew usually means boils. This is the plague of boils. Festering skin eruptions on the Egyptians and their livestock. An oozing, pus-filled beast that quite likely was another bacteria, perhaps the group Staphylococcus aureus. While not as deadly as anthrax, it is still the cause of life-threatening infections and is the most probable candidate for plague number six. And then came the locusts. The great brown locust, indigenous to Egypt, is about three inches in length. It has a large open mouth, two jaws, and four teeth which work like scissors to grab or cut. According to the Bible, the eighth plague was locusts. Millions and millions of these beasts filled the sky and cast a dark shadow over Egypt. They consumed the fields and trees, eating everything in their path. Frogs, flies, mosquitoes, wasps, locusts, and bacteria. The correct translations and scientific analyses finally provide a complete understanding of what would have been total devastation to the land of Egypt. After this barrage of beasts, Pharaoh finally let the Israelites go.